Will to win runs through Rivers

Philip Rivers, son of a football coach, would bring home the chalk and the end zone pylons from the high school equipment room.

He’d line the backyard grass and mark off the end zones and play against whatever kids were willing to do so. All day, every day.

There was even Gatorade in the cooler on the sideline.

I’ve been there, seen the Alabama sod where the future Chargers quarterback would sometimes take it a little too far. I remember that his parents told me -- and Philip Rivers later confirmed – that more than once a visiting friend/opponent would go away miffed at the intensity with which young Phil would want to win.

Chargers at Dolphins, 11/17/13

“Sometimes I’d have to say ‘Come on! We have to play harder! This isn’t a joke-around game,’ “ Rivers recalled on Wednesday.

Consider that backyard Ground Zero for what you now see on Sundays. Nothing has changed. Losing sometimes happens, but it's not something Rivers considers an option when a game starts. No matter what.

Often, too, as happens when kids are choosing up sides, there were an odd number of players to choose from. It should not surprise anyone that Rivers preferred to be on the team that was outmanned.

“It was just kind of like, it’s going to be a little harder, but we’ll win,” Rivers said Wednesday. “I’d say, ‘Give me him, and we’ll beat you.’ They’d be like, ‘This ain’t fair. We’re going to kill you.’ I didn’t care. We might have lost more than we won that way, but I wanted that fight.”

Rivers was sure to clarify that he’s not saying the Chargers are outmanned. He’s simply acknowledging that “the deck is stacked against” them considering their 4-5 record and who they have yet to play.

And he was saying he’s ready for it.

I bring this up to put an end to what seemed to be one of the topics around town this week – some postgame quotes from various players that were misinterpreted as the Chargers counting Sunday’s 28-20 loss to the Denver Broncos as a moral victory. And I’d like to use it as the starting point for an argument that this season might not be over (even though I think it is) as far as the playoffs are concerned.

The Chargers have seven games remaining, the first of them at the Miami Dolphins on Sunday.

(The Dolphins, what a perfect contrast. The ugliness that evidently reigned with the Dolphins wouldn’t occur in a locker room where Rivers and Nick Hardwick and Eric Weddle shape the culture.)

We will see this week if the Dolphins can give a better showing than they did Monday night in losing to previously winless Tampa Bay. Not being there makes it difficult to know if – as many judged to be true – the Dolphins were distracted and flat due to the Richie Incognito-Jonathan Martin mess.

I will tell you, the Chargers won’t be flat. That’s me going out on a limb, considering they’ve certainly looked awful the two times I’ve covered their games in Miami and considering no Chargers team has won in South Florida since 1982.

I’m not predicting a miracle.

Rivers isn’t saying it, but I am. The Chargers are undermanned and face too many difficult opponents to make a playoff run.

But I promise you this, as sure as anything I’ve been certain of covering this team, the Chargers will not let this season peter out.

By the end of last year, Rivers was more worn out and beaten down than I thought possible. It showed in his play. It showed in his press conferences.

He and the other leaders knew Norv Turner was going, a season was lost, even an era of opportunity was possibly closing.

Rivers later acknowledged, “It just had a feel of like ‘Uhhh.’ ”

That’s about as close as Captain Positive comes to acknowledging hopelessness.

Yet, we didn’t see despair manifested on the field. The Chargers won at Pittsburgh and New York and beat Oakland over their final four games.

(For those of you thinking it’s preposterous that professional athletes would give up, you’re wrong. It happens.)

I’d said several times before last season that a Rivers-led team, bolstered by Weddle and Hardwick, wouldn’t win fewer than seven games. They didn’t prove me wrong in 2012.